Twitter has repeatedly demonstrated that they are not a developer friendly company and that you should never build anything on their APIs. Since day one, they've done nothing but crack down on 3rd party development and peel away access.
They are the last company that should be trusted to develop an open standard.
But it looks like a ranking where one can only rank at the bottom. Who is the company most loved by developers? GitHub? Stripe? Atlassian? SalesForce? Each of them has done something wrong at some point, and it may even be the sign of management’s ability to get rid of cruft, even if those choices don’t make us happy.
I'd say they should use ActivityPub[1] instead of wasting time on their own incompatible solution, but quite frankly I don't want Twitter federating with Mastodon. We get our fill of chuds with anime avatars thanks to Pleroma, and don't really need or want Twitter around because decentralization won't make it any less of a digital sacrifice zone[2].
For those unfamiliar with this situation: Pleroma is an ActivityPub server and frontend written in Elixir and designed for low resource consumption, somewhat of an alterative to Mastodon. One or two of the most prominent early Pleroma instances had very sparse moderation policies, leading some to associate Pleroma with trolls and far-right users. Today, most Pleroma instances prohibit hate speech, harassment, and so on. Of course, anyone is free to make their own Pleroma or Mastodon instance with whatever rules and federation policies they like, and the most "chud-filled" instance in the entire fediverse (Gab) is running a Mastodon fork, not Pleroma.
This brings to mind the (truthfully) quite useless Minds.com social network. Twitter doesn't NEED a blockchain. Just look at Pleroma, Mastodon, or Gab to see p2p twitter replacements that are blockchain-free.
Interesting. Twitter early kicked open standards in the nuts, so I understand everyone who's sceptical to say the least. But if they manage to detangle that ugly mess that is the Fediverse this could be a real and good step into the right direction.
No one should trust them to do it without making it favorable to them and their business model. Microsoft was just the first to get caught and punished for embracing, extending, and extinguishing in the new century. The pattern is as old as time.
This retconned history of the mistake that's popped up in the last few years is bizarre. No one thought this at the time.
Bush tripped over his words all the time. It's much more likely that than a calculated move (that backfired btw, it's been his most famous quote since the day he said it.)
Moderation's easy in a decentralized model: run your own server, and refuse to federate with servers that are run by (or used by) people you consider to be assholes. Server admins can easily band together to contain (or isolate) "bad" servers as most of the Fediverse has done with Gab.
Same concern - I'm working on getting some info removed from mastodon. it's terrifying how hard it is to get someone (volunteer mods) to actually remove something...
This sort of case makes me an advocate for centralized access to moderate/regulate/also be accountable... but then if there's this magic backdoor to data access and removal...?
> How is decentralized twitter supposed to solve misinformation?
There will be a space where different people and organizations can build filters that rate information for veracity and other traits. Over time these filters will develop a track record. People will be able to filter their feed through such filters.
Centralized orgs can already do this, but they make a central and opaque choice about it. This means that there is a lot of pressure from various interest groups to make sure that the hidden filter is biased towards their favored viewpoint, and the users cannot really see what the result of this fight is.
It's like how it probably wouldn't be a good idea to have just one news organization that served the whole US.
I'd like to see moderation work like adblocking. You subscribe to whatever moderation feed you like, and it blocks tweets that the moderators decide to block.
If you don't like what the moderators are doing, you can select a different moderation feed, or start your own.
This way we decouple the moderation from the platform.
I like this idea. Another feature that could be helpful for users who are eary of group think thought bubbles is to have some kind of analytics on the most common types of words, phrases, and topics that the moderator censors.
> It mostly makes moderation (or censorship) impossible.
Making total censorship impossible is mostly congruent with the goals of society in my opinion. Censorship has done immense damage, e.g. Lysenkoism in the USSR (to pick a particular example).
However there is still the option for users to voluntarily opt in to certain kinds of filters. Most likely most people would voluntarily opt in to a filter that rejects child porn, for example. It's an open question whether a decentralized system with filters would lead to better overall environment, but I think it's worth trying.
I m surprised every time i see people here asking for the evil that is censorship.
Dorsey wants a decentralized system exactly because he won't be held liable for not censoring people. It makes sense business-wise and it's a win-win for humanity.
Twitter has become a trigger-happy-people-fest because each group knows they can weaponize censorship against each other. With systems that are uncensored , nobody complaints, e.g. people don't make a fuss that email is not censorious enough
> It makes sense business-wise and it's a win-win for humanity.
Does it make sense business-wise? What business will want to be on a system that has no moderation? It's just asking for your brand to be accidentally or intentionally associated with undesirable things.
The difference between Google's moderation and Twitter's moderation is, in the Google case, that the user is in control of what is "spam" and what is not (and can still consult the "spam" if any).
you would call that a filter, like spam, and of course it's essential and can be deployed in multiple points (before sending, between servers, at the client). Both users and server instance owners can have control of what they allow. There is little disagreement that these filters should exist, so i expect all server to implement them.
Censorship is about allowing e.g. governments to request takedowns globally. most servers will reject such lists.
This seems more like an appeal to emotion to justify the creation of censorship infrastructure than an actual solution to a problem.
I haven't heard of unsolicited CP being a common spam issue. And those who exchange CP intentionally can and do use encryption which makes such filters pointless.
Then you are not familiar with the Fediverse's patterns of establishing various levels of tolerance on different networks of instances for loli content (blah blah it's fiction blah blah) because otherwise it federates onto people's timelines and they're revolted. CWs do a lot to soften this.
The original argument seemed about illegal content. If you're just talking about unwanted porn, well, that's an argument for better local content filters, which is different from eradicating content at the source.
All moderation is censorship, to some degree. Even a voting system like HN's has censorship-like qualities: it is specifically designed to make unpopular comments less visible than popular ones. And that is fine, I wouldn't want to only have forums or social media with zero moderation.
Censorship only becomes a problem when it is _unavoidable_, that is, you cannot choose to live outside of some entity's censorship influence. This is where things get complicated when you have giant entities like Facebook or Twitter, which are for many people difficult to avoid (and there certainly isn't an alternative to them).
The problem arises when these entities need to choose which messages to show you. Even without putting any conscious bias in this algorithm, there is a system there which prioritizes some messages over others in a completely opaque way, which is often game-able (bad-faith actors can abuse the system to spread their propaganda, for instance). So moderation is not merely necessary but _unavoidable_, simply because there is more content than you can be presented with, and unfortunately the huge power of moderating large social media networks rests in the hands of a handful of engineers.
Decentralization is an interesting solution here because it would make the social graph and the recommender system separate entities, with clients being able to choose which recommender/moderation system they subscribe to. The need for censorship wouldn't be gone, but with people being able to choose their own censor, the massive power imbalance is not quite as bad.
i think there is a difference between suppression of minority opinions and censorship, which completely bans them. it depends on definition of course, but in its most common use, the word censorship is not subject to gradation
I think censorship is no longer censorship when it happens purely on the client side, it’s just filtering. As long as the tweets all continue to exist out there somewhere, someone can write a client to display them.
This will, I predict, make a lot of people unhappy because “omg there are Nazi tweets on my blockchain” but personally I’m happy with it.
>I m surprised every time i see people here asking for the evil that is censorship.
I'm sadly not surprised. While HN does attract hobbyists like me interested in technology and how it affects society, it also attracts a lot of those who dream of building and controlling the next big data silo for personal profit. Permanently liberating an entire mode of communication into an uncensorable distributed system that can't be easily replaced due to the network effect (such as your example of email) precludes that path to profit.
>I m surprised every time i see people here asking for the evil that is censorship.
You're posting this in a place (HN) that itself is not averse to deleting posts, shadow banning, manipulating the rank of articles, etc. Some have argued that HN is a good discussion environment precisely because of those things, though I don't necessarily agree. What I'm getting at is that you have reason to not expect sympathy for your position here.
On HN, everyone sees the same things - the same front page, the same comments, and so on. On sites like Twitter and Facebook, this is not the case. What's good for a site like HN isn't necessarily what's good for a site like Twitter.
Mastodon has a number of instance and user-level boundary controls, like image muting for porn and sex work instances, that let people still federate with instances that could be trouble without that boundary. It would keep a hypothetical Twitter.com instance from causing what happened when AOL brought millions of people online.
Exactly. I somehow doubt Dorsey doesn't know about ActivityPub - why not just endorse it publicly if he genuinely cared about decentralization?
Are there genuine technical shortcomings in the ActivityPub standard that Twitter's engineering team has identified? Why not talk about that and contribute improvements to the standard?
Are there shortcomings to being part of the standardization process in the W3C? Then talk about that and make the processes better.
Is it that he needs his name stamped on a new protocol? I'm not sure we can do much about the terminal egotism of the ultra wealthy and its pernicious effects on our society. Solving this will take a tremendous amount of collective effort.
ActivityPub is a horrible protocol, and not decentralized. Neither of you know what you're talking about, and not even the people working on AP like AP!
It's certainly decentralized, just federated instead of distributed.
And yeah, it sucks as a protocol (but not that badly, the standard is just weak like everything else the w3c produces) but it's better than reinventing the wheel. Or letting twitter unilaterally dictate a standard.
And please stop spamming the same message down the page.
First of all, I literally read the spec (and related specs) last week in detail.
Secondly, there's a massive difference between decentralized and distributed systems (I build distributed systems for a living). Perhaps you're confused about that difference?
Thirdly, if you're going to knock a collective effort like ActivityPub by calling it a "horrible protocol" without genuine technical substantiation, you're effectively just trolling. Show us that you know what you're talking about by doing some in-depth analysis of the protocol and where its shortcomings are in terms of being decentralized.
Webber's trashed it (the initial author), the biggest piece of software claiming to implement it doesn't even implement it (Mastodon), the only piece of software that stays semi-faithful is full of devs who hate it (look on their Pleroma profiles, there's a _bunch_ of bitching about AP).
You're frankly uninformed on many levels, and while I'd normally refrain from replying to someone so obviously delusional, let's give a tiny peek at the problems:
AP is completely broken for anything but publicly-scoped content, relying on a lot of trust for every party involved. This gets broken frequently, and has had consequences so far on networks implementing it.
So let's assume you can get Twitter to implement ActivityPub perfectly to-spec. Great! It doesn't work with literally any pre-existing ActivityPub software, and users' DMs and are more or less public, with users' private accounts literally being public.
I hate AP as a protocol, but also I'd still rather use it than try to invent a new one that wouldn't get a lot of traction (though I guess if you're a big corp, there will always be traction).
For two of the biggest uses of Twitter, privately-scoped posts and private messages, Twitter implementing ActivityPub would effectively make that information public. Not a good thing, and one that Twitter would get a lawsuit for. AP is broken for any use other than publicly-scoped posts, and given that Twitter is already a huge target, I think adding fuel to the fire would really be bad here.
Sorry for my ignorance but I don't understand how that's the case? As you've stated masterdon doesn't follow activitypub 100%, would would be stopping twitter from keeping their private chat between twitter users (or even adopting another open protocol such as matrix) whilst moving their public facing stuff to activitypub?
Twitter has "private accounts," which are accounts that have restricted followers, and only allow posting to followers. This is fine with Twitter's way of doing things, however breaks in a federated world.
Matrix is bad for many reasons, but it's not a direct fix over this problem more than a band-aid.
Keeping private stuff centralized would be reasonable, but they're not going to do it: expecting large entities to handle something like this with surgical precision rather than a sledgehammer is unrealistic.
> I somehow doubt Dorsey doesn't know about ActivityPub - why not just endorse it publicly if he genuinely cared about decentralization?
He doesn't care about decentralization. ActivityPub is impossible to directly control and it has no innate analytics, advertising or monetization layers. This makes it impossible for Twitter to utilize such a protocol.
If anything, Dorsey wants to embrace, extend, and extinguish AP by making an incompatible protocol that he can then pump VC money into in order to have it gain traction on Twitter's terms - with all the ads, spyware and analytics that Twitter desires.
Although knowing Mastodon doesn't mean you know ActivityPub. If I recall correctly, Mastodon didn't implement ActivityPub in the beginning but started recently (within last couple of years)
Federated means you’re part of a giant tree with some authority on the top (like DNS has with ICANN).
Decentralized means there is no center
I would add that Distributed to me seems there are no inherent “domains” you need to belong to, like for example email is federated but with scuttlebutt you’re identified by your public key and a hub is just a dumb relay and you can have many.
Non-federated routing alternatives include Kademlia (used in BitTorrent) and simple flooding/gossipping (like in Kazaa) or ad-hoc networks
What's the authority at the top of Mastadon? You can have private instances that don't federate with anyone, and there's no coordinated authority that controls any other instance.
For that matter, what is the authority at the top of email? You and I can set up an email server and start talking to each other right now without anyone's permission. We don't have to be connected to anyone else, and we don't have any authority that can control our implementations or even that keeps track of what servers exist.
I don't get the comparison between Email or Mastadon to ICANN.
If you're using Mastodon or email you need a server with a public IP address, which most people don't have. Distributed solutions like Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB) don't require that, so you can pass messages via any available relay server, LAN, or even a sneaker-net.
It's also worth mentioning that most people have to trust their Mastodon / email provider not to snoop in their private messages. Systems like SSB provide true end-to-end encryption that makes it safe to broadcast your private messages to the world.
The Web and email are both federated and thus theoretically decentralized, but in practice they're highly centralized. Yet another federated protocol (sitting on top of an already centralized federated protocol) is probably not a reliable path to decentralization.
> A distributed social network or federated social network is an Internet social networking service that is decentralized and distributed across distinct providers (something like email but for social networks), such as the Fediverse.
I can have a single non-distributed computer system and have that single computer be decentralized by having the programs it runs be done through achieving consensus. Your definitions are a bit off because Mastadon and Bitcoin are both distributed and decentralized systems.
Seems like Twitter is looking to embrace, extend and extinguish Mastodon, etc.
This is good, in a sense - means Twitter is feeling the competition. But any open source developers out there should trust Twitter just as far as you can throw them.
They should at the very least evaluate ActivityPub. It's a W3C standard that reached "Recommended" status almost two years ago, is flexible enough for future use-cases, and already has multiple implementations like Mastodon.
In fact, any app can be made to act as a source, sink or both of ActivityPub events. I recently added ActivityPub support to learnawesome.org so that reviews can be consumed in any ActivityPub client. Implementation was easy and the data model is quite easy to understand.
ActivityPub is real-time pub/sub for the entire Web, something that Twitter could have been.
A typical solution to this is to store the data outside of the blockchain and then checkpoint a hash of the data snapshot into the blockchain at regular intervals.
This provides tamper resistance to the data.
Incentivizing users or organizations to store large amounts of data is still a problem of course.
It costs ~$1500 for the Internet Archive to store a TB of data forever. Cut them a check or provide an ongoing endowment (along perhaps with some technical resources to scale up a distributed web instead of existing solely in SF) for them to be storage of last resort (everything else can be a tier of caching on your platform).
Let's Encrypt runs for around $3MM/year. Same budget for Internet Archive allows for adding storage for 2PB of content. Scale up accordingly. No blockchain! [1]
Not really? From my perspective as an outside observer, the WHATWG is the one built/captured by corporations. The W3C gave up and agrees now that the HTML spec is mostly just whatever WHATWG says it is, but that's partly because the W3C seems more interested in putting time/money/effort into standardizing things where they are wanted such as ActivityPub.
It has learned from those times, as much as you can even talk about "W3C" as an entity doing coherent things. Individual working groups have can have very little overlap with other groups, and have a lot of freedom in how they work. Which means they can putter about in ivory towers, or do effective work, as they wish.
I agree that sounds good, but can you point to something that they have actually done lately?
The ActivityPub process is a good example - yes, it got there, but much of the difficulties around the standardisation process seem related to the W3C process, not standardisation itself.
I was involved around the edges of the Atom standardisation process[1]. There's a reason that went through the IEFT and not the W3C[2].
Three reasons why not: operational, business, and technical.
Operational: they don’t control features; adding them by contributing to the standard would leak planned features, and without contributing, would be seen as embrace-extend-extinguish.
Business: it would contribute work to their competitors.
Technical: implementing global search on it is implausible.
This is doomed from the start, then. There’s no way for them to work on an open standard without leaking features or contributing work to their competitors.
Publicly, organize social engagement. As long as they are at the helm, and at the forefront of tech innovation, they won't have issues on that goal.
Privately, diffuse regulatory pressure. If unlike Facebook, they can share blame with other actors, they won't singlehandedly be responsible for political mayhem, so there won't be calls to break up Twitter. It is the whack-a-mole approach, similar to BitTorrent vs. Napster.
> If unlike Facebook, they can share blame with other actors, they won't singlehandedly be responsible for political mayhem, so there won't be calls to break up Twitter.
I don't buy this. Nothing is going to change from the user perspective, and almost nobody in the grand scheme of things will likely be aware of this open standard anyway, let alone people working in government. I don't see how this will change the public and political perception of social media websites whatsoever.
well it would solve problems for all the people who really do want to use a different / better social network or chat app but cant get their friends to switch too, killing the idea on arrival. that would change perception of social media, because it'd allow every host-site could be distinct to their targeted users' qualities as a group, but maintain connections to everyone in their lives.
i mean, you arent really saying that you dont believe a massively-confederated social networking infrastructure would change the political perception of social media? i think it necessarily would, and change every individuals relationship to social media too. its like that marshall mcLuhan quote 'the medium is the message', ie the medium defines what it contains and what those contents mean.
Maybe I'm being cynical, but I'm skeptical that whatever "open standard" Twitter is working on will achieve that utopian future you're dreaming of. In practice, I think the vast majority of people won't even know it exists and will continue to exclusively use their preferred platform (Twitter, Facebook, whatever) despite all the issues with it. The idea of being able to move all of your content to another social network at a whim, with all your connections undisturbed, is (IMO) simply never going to be something that your average user does, no matter how technically feasible it is.
Hopefully I'm wrong and I'm not giving enough credit to social media users in aggregate.
yeah i mean honestly you're probably right. But in reality, the whole point of advocating for something that skeptics call "utopian" isn't to achieve that specific utopia per se. IT is to make improvements towards that "utopia". Like for example, if this social media interoperability and open standard world is our utopia, that would rely on having at least a framework for inter-network communication and migration from one to another.
What im saying is you probably never get to the utopia, but maybe building some of the requirements for that utopia will be beneficial in an ever imperfect world.
Maybe I misunderstand the scope of the technical details, but if the underlying flow of messages across social media was forcibly abstracted to a universal master hub, then could not individual clients (or sub-platforms) not then exert control over capabilities (filtering, censorship, etc) that is currently controlled entirely by the individual social media platforms who own the networks and userbase?
> and almost nobody in the grand scheme of things will likely be aware of this open standard anyway, let alone people working in government. I don't see how this will change the public and political perception of social media websites whatsoever.
I would argue this is a side-effect of the current state of affairs - obfuscation during studies and testimony (what little takes place), but mainly the inability to demonstrate superior implementations.
I'd rather we don't give up without having actually tried anything.
EDIT: Although, I could easily agree that this is simply a disingenuous smokescreen to buy time and mitigate legislative risks. In fact, I'd bet money on it.
> Although, I could easily agree that this is simply a disingenuous smokescreen to buy time and mitigate legislative risks. In fact, I'd bet money on it.
To be clear, this is roughly what I'm arguing. In theory, I openly welcome Twitter and Facebook adopting an open standard and giving users the option of easily moving their content to another service, but I don't think it will pan out that way in practice due to the current state of affairs. For one, brand recognition is very powerful, and I think Twitter knows this and is banking on momentum keeping users on their platform regardless of the technical ability to move to another service. Also, most people simply won't understand the implications of this standard or why they should care. ("Why would I use XYZ when I can just use Twitter/Facebook?")
You actually describe yet another benefit of decentralisation.
Because this would certainly happen when the current movement of email into two major silo's (Gmail, Outlook) goes forward. When those two (or three, or four) have a majority of email-users on board, governments will start discouraging or forbidding usage of other mailservers. And will start making demands of those few leftover mailserver monopolists.
That’s fair, but then why are they receiving any sort of praise for this? Neither of those goals benefit anyone who doesn’t work for or own stock in Twitter.
Indeed. If they aren't working on an open standard, what are they working on, and what's the point then? It won't solve any of the problems open standard is supposed to solve.
i feel like the function of success would be pushed into other areas like the actual value of the feature being made available to competitors. or speed of competitors adoption of said feature. basically, sharing a foundational open standard could make everything thats distinct about a feature's implementation, or that companies policies / mission, the decider about what differentiates success.
now, current leaders probably wouldnt want to adopt a system like this because it would be a test of their value on all those metrics, but i wouldnt say that makes the notion doomed from the start. i get what you mean though.
i mean, where would be right now without the open standards of 30 years ago?
Completely agree; commercial services prefer to use their own protocol over a common protocol for technical and commercial reasons. For example XMPP is a federated messaging protocol but Facebook Chat moved off XMPP, AOL AIM moved off XMPP, Google Talk moved of XMPP., even Twitter moved off XMPP at one point, because they all implemented custom features and eventually devolve from the base protocol.
I read this as a trivial 'truth' that I've internalized myself as well; but the way you worded it... makes me naively ask:
doesn't it speak to the limitations or choices of XMPP itself then, not the idea of a common protocol, if businesses can't reliably extend the protocol (only custom fork, and somehow barring eventual upstream contrib, whatever)?
I can think of an extensible protocol paradigm, with 'extensions' (really just libraries, packages, like those we fetch with `apt` or `npm` and optionally push to clients as well). Down to first principles, that's how we structured UNIX/Linux, most modern programming languages, the web itself (well, at least the Js and now wasm part of it).
I actually don't think it has anything to do with technology or problems with XMPP. Corporations can move standards better than anyone (look at web and chrome/google). If Google and Facebook had scale problems then they would just build better implementation.
Facebook messages happened when FB didn't have so many users and in chat space there were XMPP services like ICQ/Jabber. Network effect was against FB so it made lot of sense to federate. When FB was convinced that by killing federation more people come to FB instead of leaving they just pulled the plug.
I am sure that if 80% of email users were using gmail Google would do the same thing. There is a chance of that happening... First gmail adds some amazing but nonstandard features, people start relying on those features and in time gmail becomes the one. Only thing thats keeping that from happening is actually other big businesses.
I'm not sure what you would want from a standard. The basic idea is very simple, crawl the entire web starting from a few known points and visiting every single url you see on every page. Now you have an index of the internet you can run searches on.
The only problem is meaningfully ordering those results and having the computing power to do it. An open standard doesn't solve those.
> Technical: implementing global search on it is implausible.
How does TOR work then? Simple caching layers and nodes maintaining search indexes is all it takes. Probably not as up to date or fast as duckduckgo, but still functional.
Operational: activitypub can be extended with proprietary vocabulary without any issues, so they can develop features quietly before proposing them for inclusion in the spec, if they even do that.
Business: what kind of work would contribute to their competitors? On the standard? Well, 90% of open standards (invented number) was created by for profit companies. On libraries and services, why would it?
Technical: implementing global search on the www as a whole is also impossible.
About Twitter RSS: I recently discovered nitter.net. It's a Twitter front-end without all that tracking and with the addition of RSS. Jack's at https://nitter.net/jack and the RSS is https://nitter.net/jack/rss
I really like this. I had been looking for a cli client and wasn't impressed by any of them, and this seems like a good compromise for reading others timelines, especially since I am an RSS-aholic.
Best to think about it like email. You can send and receive email to anyone at any domain, if their server is set up for email. We all just happened to centralize ourselves onto Gmail and Google's servers.
Replace email with "social media content" and you have ActivityPub.
@jack's idea probably involves some kind of cryptocurrency integration into the protocol. I think having a digital native currency can alter the economics of protocols. The end result may be some combination of ActivityPub and an economic incentive layer.
ActivityPub lacks cryptographic signing/identity (table stakes for 2020) and anti-censorship features. It is more of an MVP/example than a mature, forward-looking protocol design.
I am a daily and happy user of Mastodon. I honestly see no reason to use Twitter, nor one of their products at this time. Calling it now: too little, too late.
> They should at the very least evaluate ActivityPub. It's a W3C standard that reached "Recommended" status almost two years ago, is flexible enough for future use-cases, and already has multiple implementations like Mastodon.
Sadly, all centralized Facebook/Twitter/YouTube since 1st January of 2020 would add more restrictions (according each new ToS and Privacy rules).
BTW, I already prepared for fully migrating my Twitter activity to Mastodon.
I'm cautiously optimistic. Twitter has been been making some bad decisions with content moderation, and has abandoned the idea of being the "Free Speech Wing of the Free Speech Party". Decentralization should restore that...
...should. That notion could disappear really fast if Twitter gets to decide who can run an instance based on their belief systems.
In the mean time, it's an interesting case study of what happened to Wil Wheaton when he tried to join a Mastodon instance. Already, even in these comments, people are expressing concerns about how Twitter will be able to maintain control over "misinformation and abuse".
That's the whole point of decentralization guys. It's impossible to moderate Twitter without being authoritarian and creepy. Bail on the concept of controlling others, and delegate that power to the end user by means of improved blocking tools.
If decentralization is going to work, we have to abandon our desire to control others with a centralized authority, and accept that responsibility as our own.
Is gab really a “cesspool”? I just looked at it for the first time. The way people talk about it I was expecting /pol/ squared, but the parts I could see without making an account seemed surprisingly normie, more reminiscent of instapundit than Stormfront.
Gab is a good site and has been vilified by the rage mobs that only want to hear one side of any issue. And like many sites, there will always be the fringe lunatics, but that is what free speech is all about.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 309 ms ] threadThey are the last company that should be trusted to develop an open standard.
Because there has to be one giant tech company that everyone hates and Microsoft lost interest in the position over 5 years ago.
... and Oracle's got one hell of a lead on the rest of the race.
1: https://activitypub.rocks/
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacrifice_zone
"In 2019 Anime will be associated with fascism, neo-Nazis, and hard-core misogyny." - Time traveler me from the future.
"LOL WUT?" - Me in 2005 before murdering this obviously false me from an obviously impossible timeline to prevent damage to the space-time continuum.
Of course, plenty of reasons to be sceptical about them either going with ActivityPub, or not.
This brings to mind the (truthfully) quite useless Minds.com social network. Twitter doesn't NEED a blockchain. Just look at Pleroma, Mastodon, or Gab to see p2p twitter replacements that are blockchain-free.
Bush tripped over his words all the time. It's much more likely that than a calculated move (that backfired btw, it's been his most famous quote since the day he said it.)
I remember hearing people suggest this is why he misspoke shortly after it happened.
Of all people to give the benefit of the doubt to...you give it to a bumbling idiot who was known for misspeaking and tongue tying himself into knots?
Before he even messed up the saying, he messed up his own introduction to the saying:
>There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee...
It mostly makes moderation (or censorship) impossible.
This sort of case makes me an advocate for centralized access to moderate/regulate/also be accountable... but then if there's this magic backdoor to data access and removal...?
There will be a space where different people and organizations can build filters that rate information for veracity and other traits. Over time these filters will develop a track record. People will be able to filter their feed through such filters.
Centralized orgs can already do this, but they make a central and opaque choice about it. This means that there is a lot of pressure from various interest groups to make sure that the hidden filter is biased towards their favored viewpoint, and the users cannot really see what the result of this fight is.
It's like how it probably wouldn't be a good idea to have just one news organization that served the whole US.
If you don't like what the moderators are doing, you can select a different moderation feed, or start your own.
This way we decouple the moderation from the platform.
Making total censorship impossible is mostly congruent with the goals of society in my opinion. Censorship has done immense damage, e.g. Lysenkoism in the USSR (to pick a particular example).
However there is still the option for users to voluntarily opt in to certain kinds of filters. Most likely most people would voluntarily opt in to a filter that rejects child porn, for example. It's an open question whether a decentralized system with filters would lead to better overall environment, but I think it's worth trying.
Dorsey wants a decentralized system exactly because he won't be held liable for not censoring people. It makes sense business-wise and it's a win-win for humanity.
Twitter has become a trigger-happy-people-fest because each group knows they can weaponize censorship against each other. With systems that are uncensored , nobody complaints, e.g. people don't make a fuss that email is not censorious enough
Does it make sense business-wise? What business will want to be on a system that has no moderation? It's just asking for your brand to be accidentally or intentionally associated with undesirable things.
tons of businesses send promotional emails , even though they know the protocol is also used for sending porjn
The questions are where do you draw the line, and who gets to decide where the line is drawn?
you would call that a filter, like spam, and of course it's essential and can be deployed in multiple points (before sending, between servers, at the client). Both users and server instance owners can have control of what they allow. There is little disagreement that these filters should exist, so i expect all server to implement them.
Censorship is about allowing e.g. governments to request takedowns globally. most servers will reject such lists.
I haven't heard of unsolicited CP being a common spam issue. And those who exchange CP intentionally can and do use encryption which makes such filters pointless.
Censorship only becomes a problem when it is _unavoidable_, that is, you cannot choose to live outside of some entity's censorship influence. This is where things get complicated when you have giant entities like Facebook or Twitter, which are for many people difficult to avoid (and there certainly isn't an alternative to them).
The problem arises when these entities need to choose which messages to show you. Even without putting any conscious bias in this algorithm, there is a system there which prioritizes some messages over others in a completely opaque way, which is often game-able (bad-faith actors can abuse the system to spread their propaganda, for instance). So moderation is not merely necessary but _unavoidable_, simply because there is more content than you can be presented with, and unfortunately the huge power of moderating large social media networks rests in the hands of a handful of engineers.
Decentralization is an interesting solution here because it would make the social graph and the recommender system separate entities, with clients being able to choose which recommender/moderation system they subscribe to. The need for censorship wouldn't be gone, but with people being able to choose their own censor, the massive power imbalance is not quite as bad.
This will, I predict, make a lot of people unhappy because “omg there are Nazi tweets on my blockchain” but personally I’m happy with it.
I'm sadly not surprised. While HN does attract hobbyists like me interested in technology and how it affects society, it also attracts a lot of those who dream of building and controlling the next big data silo for personal profit. Permanently liberating an entire mode of communication into an uncensorable distributed system that can't be easily replaced due to the network effect (such as your example of email) precludes that path to profit.
You're posting this in a place (HN) that itself is not averse to deleting posts, shadow banning, manipulating the rank of articles, etc. Some have argued that HN is a good discussion environment precisely because of those things, though I don't necessarily agree. What I'm getting at is that you have reason to not expect sympathy for your position here.
How is this not a laughable expectation? You may as well expect them to "solve evil".
https://twitter.com/MastodonProject/status/12047748080153272...
Mastodon has a number of instance and user-level boundary controls, like image muting for porn and sex work instances, that let people still federate with instances that could be trouble without that boundary. It would keep a hypothetical Twitter.com instance from causing what happened when AOL brought millions of people online.
https://gitlab.com/fediverse/fediverse.gitlab.io/wikis/watch...
Are there genuine technical shortcomings in the ActivityPub standard that Twitter's engineering team has identified? Why not talk about that and contribute improvements to the standard?
Are there shortcomings to being part of the standardization process in the W3C? Then talk about that and make the processes better.
Is it that he needs his name stamped on a new protocol? I'm not sure we can do much about the terminal egotism of the ultra wealthy and its pernicious effects on our society. Solving this will take a tremendous amount of collective effort.
And yeah, it sucks as a protocol (but not that badly, the standard is just weak like everything else the w3c produces) but it's better than reinventing the wheel. Or letting twitter unilaterally dictate a standard.
And please stop spamming the same message down the page.
Secondly, there's a massive difference between decentralized and distributed systems (I build distributed systems for a living). Perhaps you're confused about that difference?
Thirdly, if you're going to knock a collective effort like ActivityPub by calling it a "horrible protocol" without genuine technical substantiation, you're effectively just trolling. Show us that you know what you're talking about by doing some in-depth analysis of the protocol and where its shortcomings are in terms of being decentralized.
You're frankly uninformed on many levels, and while I'd normally refrain from replying to someone so obviously delusional, let's give a tiny peek at the problems:
AP is completely broken for anything but publicly-scoped content, relying on a lot of trust for every party involved. This gets broken frequently, and has had consequences so far on networks implementing it.
The specification itself is far too ambiguous. If you've got a lick of sense, you'd know this. But here's a post by a maintainer of Diaspora explaining this part further: https://schub.io/blog/2018/02/01/activitypub-one-protocol-to...
So let's assume you can get Twitter to implement ActivityPub perfectly to-spec. Great! It doesn't work with literally any pre-existing ActivityPub software, and users' DMs and are more or less public, with users' private accounts literally being public.
Matrix is bad for many reasons, but it's not a direct fix over this problem more than a band-aid.
Keeping private stuff centralized would be reasonable, but they're not going to do it: expecting large entities to handle something like this with surgical precision rather than a sledgehammer is unrealistic.
This would be inappropriate even if you weren't factually wrong.
There's a reason why people stick with Facebook, go to WhatsApp, Telegram and what not: most of us don't want to communicate publicly all the time.
He doesn't care about decentralization. ActivityPub is impossible to directly control and it has no innate analytics, advertising or monetization layers. This makes it impossible for Twitter to utilize such a protocol.
If anything, Dorsey wants to embrace, extend, and extinguish AP by making an incompatible protocol that he can then pump VC money into in order to have it gain traction on Twitter's terms - with all the ads, spyware and analytics that Twitter desires.
The protocol wars begin anew.
Dorsey follows the Mastodon twitter account - he knows about it.
Your doubts are correct. From the thread:
>@halcy: So, ActivityPub?
>@jack: Team will have charge to choose whatever is best, be that what exists today or start from scratch.
https://twitter.com/jack/status/1204807357294727168
[0] Haha
Perhaps you could explain?
Decentralized means there is no center
I would add that Distributed to me seems there are no inherent “domains” you need to belong to, like for example email is federated but with scuttlebutt you’re identified by your public key and a hub is just a dumb relay and you can have many.
Non-federated routing alternatives include Kademlia (used in BitTorrent) and simple flooding/gossipping (like in Kazaa) or ad-hoc networks
For that matter, what is the authority at the top of email? You and I can set up an email server and start talking to each other right now without anyone's permission. We don't have to be connected to anyone else, and we don't have any authority that can control our implementations or even that keeps track of what servers exist.
I don't get the comparison between Email or Mastadon to ICANN.
It's also worth mentioning that most people have to trust their Mastodon / email provider not to snoop in their private messages. Systems like SSB provide true end-to-end encryption that makes it safe to broadcast your private messages to the world.
Further, GNU Social still doesn't implement AP. This is largely because AP is very annoying to implement, but also because GNU Social sucks.
Will keep my fingers crossed.
> A distributed social network or federated social network is an Internet social networking service that is decentralized and distributed across distinct providers (something like email but for social networks), such as the Fediverse.
Centralized = One central system runs everything (i.e. Twitter, Facebook)
Decentralized = Multiple central systems run everything, but they talk to each other and you can build your own (i.e. email, Mastodon/ActivityPub)
Distributed = No central system at all (i.e. Bitcoin)
I can have a single non-distributed computer system and have that single computer be decentralized by having the programs it runs be done through achieving consensus. Your definitions are a bit off because Mastadon and Bitcoin are both distributed and decentralized systems.
This is good, in a sense - means Twitter is feeling the competition. But any open source developers out there should trust Twitter just as far as you can throw them.
In fact, any app can be made to act as a source, sink or both of ActivityPub events. I recently added ActivityPub support to learnawesome.org so that reviews can be consumed in any ActivityPub client. Implementation was easy and the data model is quite easy to understand.
ActivityPub is real-time pub/sub for the entire Web, something that Twitter could have been.
https://w3c.github.io/activitypub/
http://activitypub.rocks/
There are egos at stake here!
Also ActivityPub relies on servers/federated rather than p2p.
As with all(Most) Blockchains ~ it simply is too expensive to store data. Especially at any scale.
This provides tamper resistance to the data.
Incentivizing users or organizations to store large amounts of data is still a problem of course.
Let's Encrypt runs for around $3MM/year. Same budget for Internet Archive allows for adding storage for 2PB of content. Scale up accordingly. No blockchain! [1]
[1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Die5UdaX0AALEtL.jpg
I agree that sounds good, but can you point to something that they have actually done lately?
The ActivityPub process is a good example - yes, it got there, but much of the difficulties around the standardisation process seem related to the W3C process, not standardisation itself.
I was involved around the edges of the Atom standardisation process[1]. There's a reason that went through the IEFT and not the W3C[2].
[1] https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4287.txt
[2] https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/06/10/AtomIETFY...
Twitter management actively and specifically decided to not be that.
Operational: they don’t control features; adding them by contributing to the standard would leak planned features, and without contributing, would be seen as embrace-extend-extinguish.
Business: it would contribute work to their competitors.
Technical: implementing global search on it is implausible.
I see one public and one private:
Publicly, organize social engagement. As long as they are at the helm, and at the forefront of tech innovation, they won't have issues on that goal.
Privately, diffuse regulatory pressure. If unlike Facebook, they can share blame with other actors, they won't singlehandedly be responsible for political mayhem, so there won't be calls to break up Twitter. It is the whack-a-mole approach, similar to BitTorrent vs. Napster.
I don't buy this. Nothing is going to change from the user perspective, and almost nobody in the grand scheme of things will likely be aware of this open standard anyway, let alone people working in government. I don't see how this will change the public and political perception of social media websites whatsoever.
i mean, you arent really saying that you dont believe a massively-confederated social networking infrastructure would change the political perception of social media? i think it necessarily would, and change every individuals relationship to social media too. its like that marshall mcLuhan quote 'the medium is the message', ie the medium defines what it contains and what those contents mean.
Hopefully I'm wrong and I'm not giving enough credit to social media users in aggregate.
What im saying is you probably never get to the utopia, but maybe building some of the requirements for that utopia will be beneficial in an ever imperfect world.
> and almost nobody in the grand scheme of things will likely be aware of this open standard anyway, let alone people working in government. I don't see how this will change the public and political perception of social media websites whatsoever.
I would argue this is a side-effect of the current state of affairs - obfuscation during studies and testimony (what little takes place), but mainly the inability to demonstrate superior implementations.
I'd rather we don't give up without having actually tried anything.
EDIT: Although, I could easily agree that this is simply a disingenuous smokescreen to buy time and mitigate legislative risks. In fact, I'd bet money on it.
To be clear, this is roughly what I'm arguing. In theory, I openly welcome Twitter and Facebook adopting an open standard and giving users the option of easily moving their content to another service, but I don't think it will pan out that way in practice due to the current state of affairs. For one, brand recognition is very powerful, and I think Twitter knows this and is banking on momentum keeping users on their platform regardless of the technical ability to move to another service. Also, most people simply won't understand the implications of this standard or why they should care. ("Why would I use XYZ when I can just use Twitter/Facebook?")
Because this would certainly happen when the current movement of email into two major silo's (Gmail, Outlook) goes forward. When those two (or three, or four) have a majority of email-users on board, governments will start discouraging or forbidding usage of other mailservers. And will start making demands of those few leftover mailserver monopolists.
now, current leaders probably wouldnt want to adopt a system like this because it would be a test of their value on all those metrics, but i wouldnt say that makes the notion doomed from the start. i get what you mean though.
i mean, where would be right now without the open standards of 30 years ago?
doesn't it speak to the limitations or choices of XMPP itself then, not the idea of a common protocol, if businesses can't reliably extend the protocol (only custom fork, and somehow barring eventual upstream contrib, whatever)?
I can think of an extensible protocol paradigm, with 'extensions' (really just libraries, packages, like those we fetch with `apt` or `npm` and optionally push to clients as well). Down to first principles, that's how we structured UNIX/Linux, most modern programming languages, the web itself (well, at least the Js and now wasm part of it).
(Thinking out loud...)
Facebook messages happened when FB didn't have so many users and in chat space there were XMPP services like ICQ/Jabber. Network effect was against FB so it made lot of sense to federate. When FB was convinced that by killing federation more people come to FB instead of leaving they just pulled the plug.
I am sure that if 80% of email users were using gmail Google would do the same thing. There is a chance of that happening... First gmail adds some amazing but nonstandard features, people start relying on those features and in time gmail becomes the one. Only thing thats keeping that from happening is actually other big businesses.
The only problem is meaningfully ordering those results and having the computing power to do it. An open standard doesn't solve those.
too bad humans don't follow a standard of decency, so those were abused to the point of being ignored.
How does TOR work then? Simple caching layers and nodes maintaining search indexes is all it takes. Probably not as up to date or fast as duckduckgo, but still functional.
Which is converging on a monarchy.
Many, many private money grabs were made trying to establish a proprietary replacement to web standards, including ActiveX, Flash, and NaCL.
If that’s the case it’s just going to be dumb crap; it’s driven by business and not technology.
Business: what kind of work would contribute to their competitors? On the standard? Well, 90% of open standards (invented number) was created by for profit companies. On libraries and services, why would it?
Technical: implementing global search on the www as a whole is also impossible.
About Twitter RSS: I recently discovered nitter.net. It's a Twitter front-end without all that tracking and with the addition of RSS. Jack's at https://nitter.net/jack and the RSS is https://nitter.net/jack/rss
This rules out a lot of existing projects. IMO rules out AP, SSB, Matrix, etc
Replace email with "social media content" and you have ActivityPub.
Sadly, all centralized Facebook/Twitter/YouTube since 1st January of 2020 would add more restrictions (according each new ToS and Privacy rules).
BTW, I already prepared for fully migrating my Twitter activity to Mastodon.
...should. That notion could disappear really fast if Twitter gets to decide who can run an instance based on their belief systems.
In the mean time, it's an interesting case study of what happened to Wil Wheaton when he tried to join a Mastodon instance. Already, even in these comments, people are expressing concerns about how Twitter will be able to maintain control over "misinformation and abuse".
That's the whole point of decentralization guys. It's impossible to moderate Twitter without being authoritarian and creepy. Bail on the concept of controlling others, and delegate that power to the end user by means of improved blocking tools.
If decentralization is going to work, we have to abandon our desire to control others with a centralized authority, and accept that responsibility as our own.
It would be a different scenario if it was the big network that supported free speech instead of a new ban reactionary network